Guest-blogging today is MM Pollard of Workshops with MM, an editor with Black Velvet Seductions. MM will be teaching OCCRWA’s March Online Class, “Writing Fiction with Impact”
When you hear the phrase “rhetorical devices,†do you break out in a rash? Do you think they are only for lawyers and other people who argue for a living? Do you think including them in your fiction will make your writing sound artificial and too scholarly for your readers?
We could do that in April or October just as well. For that matter, we could do it today. So what’s the big deal about a new year?
Ask anyone who’s made some significant life change — getting married, choosing a new job, deciding to publish a novel — if they were inspired by a new page on the calendar, and chances are good they’ll say no.
Even so, most of us like the idea of making SOME kind of change as a new year begins. And for writers, it makes sense that the change is frequently related to what or why or how we write.
What do you write?
Do you still love it? Have you tried other kinds of writing? What would happen if you did? How did you choose what sort of writer you wanted to become?
Why do you write? What got you started? What does it DO for you — aside from making you elated and making you frustrated, depending on how the story’s doing? Why are you writing instead of, say, fly-fishing?
(For anybody who explains that it’s because their favorite fly-fishing stream is covered with ice in the winter, that’s a perfectly good explanation!)
Finally, how do you write?
Aside from being a plotter or pantser, do you have rituals? A love or a fear of deadlines? A preference for plot or character, setting or action, description or dialogue, process or product? A particular place or time you like to think up plot twists, interview characters, get your outline or paragraphs down on the page?
Some of what you’re doing right now, some of what you’ve been doing ever since you began writing, works beautifully for you.
Some of it, maybe not so much.
Which is where we get into the idea of New Year, New You.
If there’s anything you especially love about your writing, or if there’s anything that bothers you about your writing, here’s a good time & place to look at that.
The past seven times I’ve taught this class, last-day messages have ranged from “it’s such a relief to discover I’m not the only one who works that way” to “I never realized how much I needed this change” to “finally, I’ve discovered what I was missing!”
Everyone’s reaction is different. Some writers are inspired to switch genres. Some might decide to take up fly-fishing (although no one’s reported that yet). Others report a breakthrough, like those who’ve mentioned this class in their first-book acknowledgments.
If you have any questions on whether “New Year New You” can help with some issue in your writing life, let me know here or privately at Book Laurie Gmail Com — you can figure out where to email, right? — and I promise I’ll give you a straight answer.
Meanwhile, whether or not you use the upcoming new year to inspire any kind of changes in your life, here’s hoping you love the results!
OCCRWA’s November Online Class starts November 10th and features full-time writer and blogger, Erica Barton. Here’s Erica on her upcoming class:
Do you have a book on Amazon with sluggish sales? Or is your book about to be published on Amazon and you want to promote it? Are you a traditionally published author wondering what you could do to spike your rankings, or a self-published author who is really hoping to see your book hit one of Amazon’s lists?
Well, guess what! It’s easier than you think. Amazon has created dozens of tools to help any author at any stage of their career promote their books.
In this workshop, you are going to find out:
And much more–here’s one example of additional content:
Every author gets them, no matter how good the author is. For example, “Beautiful Creatures†(a book that was made into a movie) has 90 1-star reviews from the Haters, but that’s only 90 bad reviews out of 3,551 reviews total. And while it may seem like a negative thing, it can actually be good for two reasons.
1) Haters often raise the ire of the Lovers who will come to your book’s defense for you. And,
2) They give an honest perspective to the book which lets potential readers know that there are real people reading the book versus an author bribing people to go in and leave good reviews.
The facts are these. You will probably get bad reviews when you run a KDP promotion because people who don’t read your genre are going to pick up your book for free. Not only that, but there are authors without scruples who will go in and try to tank your book sales by leaving a bad review so that authors will go check out their book instead. Finally, there are the people who will just hate your book no matter what because they just don’t like your voice or your plot, or whatever.
In regards to those people, I say don’t let them get you down. Bad press is still press, and every review kicks up that little number of total reviews. Get enough reviews and those bad ones get washed out by the good ones.
But, let’s not dwell on bad reviews. Instead, let’s talk about how to deal with them.
It’s Alina again. To check out Erica’s class or sign up, visit http://www.occrwa.org/onlineclassNov14.html
On April 14th we’ll kick off an online class taught by our own Elena, Dillon, and she’s with us here today to talk about the class. Take it away, Elena:
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More info →A Slice of Orange is an affiliate with some of the booksellers listed on this website, including Barnes & Nobel, Books A Million, iBooks, Kobo, and Smashwords. This means A Slice of Orange may earn a small advertising fee from sales made through the links used on this website. There are reminders of these affiliate links on the pages for individual books.
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